RosieBell

Random Blog Irritation

So you do the flaneur's wander round the internet and via a hyperlink at one of your haunts, you settle yourself down at a post.  Modern life. . .

And this is what you find:-

Simon Cowell has only one true love - himself

Why does the hollow, narcissistic king of karaoke have such a hold over our lives?

One of those "we" "our" references - speak for yourself and your loser mates, Mr Paid-Blogger.  So Mr P-B goes on to write his 1000 words about the mental energy he has spent on Simon Cowell is mental energy that only a society in the state of decline would thus have him spend:-

Perhaps the end approaches for the Cowell Dominion, as it did for Mr Blair once he decided that Britain was too insignificant and tried to crack the US. The Cowellite stranglehold on TV audiences, on both sides of the Atlantic, appears to be weakening. Yet it is folly to write him off while he still fascinates so deeply that one cannot read about his preference for black toilet paper – a peculiar choice of hue for reasons plainly unsuited to your breakfast table – without borrowing Metternich’s question about Talleyrand’s death to ask: “Now what did he mean by that?” There is no answer. The only lesson taught by examining the intimate life of Simon Cowell is the hackneyed old one about ourselves. We remain marooned in a time of such gruesome fin de siècle decadence that Mr Cowell’s perplexing taste in loo rolls must, like everything else about him, be analysed for clues to its wider implications as if it were a Supreme Soviet pronouncement at the height of the Cold War.

If this is the fin de siecle decadence, "we" are for horrors to come, and "we" will look back on "our" time when we analysed Cowell's anal-wipes with the same nostalgia as the post-World War I generation for the golden summer of England, 1914.  Also, isn't it grand to be out of the Cold War, and in more frivolous times?  Mr Paid-Blogger will soon be evoking rationing and the blitz as being better for our characters than gaming and Madonna's stage costumes.

Paid-Blogger hasn't got the honesty to say, "I am really interested in Simon Cowell and so are a lot of my readers."  No, he's writing serious analysis on what it means to be interested in Simon Cowell, putting it in a cultural context. He's not a writer for Heat, but a sociologist.  That is a trick that The Guardian pulls and now it has spread to the Daily Telegraph.  I wish it stuck to its old Tory guns and went on about cuckoos and herbaceous borders. 

I can't be bothered reading the thread - "we" have such short attention spans - but I do hope some High Court Judge is there asking, "Who is Simon Cowell?"

If you are idiot enough to want to read more, here's the link.

The Culture Pulpers

I have to blog one piece about this assault on the culture - the culture that I know best - the poetry reading or small gig in the pub, the singers with their guitars playing in the corner, the modest little festival for local talent - the cultural equivalent of the blog.  This is DIY culture, as necessary to the comeliness of the nation as the millions of gardeners planting bulbs and putting up hanging baskets who know they will not be entries into the Chelsea Flower Show but who make the streets bright and pleasant. 

Here's a good piece on it:-

“Farcical.” That was how a leader column in this morning’s Scotsman described a new law forcing small, free events to apply for expensive entertainment licences.

Shortly afterwards, news broke that Highland Council was planning to charge a community group £153 to have an easter egg hunt. So will children be breaking the law if they roll Easter eggs this year without a licence? Yup, farcical is the word.

What next? A silly season’s worth of similar stories, potentially, if this daft, clumsy piece of legislation - part of the 2010 Criminal Justice and Licensing Act - goes ahead. One strategy being discussed by campaigners against the law (whose numbers are increasing by the day) is to flood councils with licence applications for hundreds of absurd events, such as “putting purple glitter all over the billboard outside the old social security building while my pals watch/take photos/ignore/drink beer”. In Edinburgh a day of artistic April Foolery is being considered for 1 April, the day the law comes into force.

There has been much serious, necessary discussion about the troubling implications of this law. For Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman last week, it is a warning sign that Britain is “drifting towards new forms of an authoritarianism that once seemed in permanent retreat”.

For art historian and critic Neil Mulholland, writing in Bella Caledonia, the law is an assault on human rights that could “undermine the very idea that all Scottish citizens can and should freely participate in the production and consumption of culture”. This is not, in other words, about money - it’s about democracy and civility.

Read the rest - it covers the issues very well.

Happy Pedant

Spring, and I was out in the garden planting seeds and clearing winter debris while listening to Radio 4's Saturday afternoon play An American Rose.  This slot is usually good, the play often based on some event in  history or an actual person.  Today's was about Rosemary Kennedy, the Kennedy daughter who had mental problems and was lobotomised, and her lively sister Kathleen, a war widow, who was killed in a flying accident.   It was well written and well acted, but I was happy to find two anachronisms.

Rose Kennedy scolds her daughters for lying on their beds wearing "designer gowns".  This is the 1930s - was "designer" used as an adjective then?  Wouldn't she have said "haute couture" or just "couture"?

Someone is described as a "commitmentphobe".   They certainly had the thing then, but the word?  That is very recent - appearing in the last 20 or 30 years I would have said.

Kathleen Kennedy

When I say I was "happy" to find two anachronisms, I'm remembering Hazlitt's remark:- "He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.' 

The bloke next door said I must be pleased to be gardening again since I missed last year, having been absent from my flat because of its half destruction by pipes bursting upstairs on Boxing Day 2010.  He cheered me up by saying last year had been a terrible gardening year.  It rained a good deal and courgettes rotted.

Slippery Slyboots

This is an addition to Jim Denham's excellent post over at Shiraz Socialist.

Why doesn't Terry Eagleton come out as a Catholic?  It's not like coming out as a Jehovah's Witness or a Scientologist or even a Mormon. Roman Catholicism is an ancient religion which has spread throughout the world, and so is not seen as weird or cultish.   Also, a literary critic like Eagleton could consider the twentieth century writers in English who were Catholics – Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark just for starters.  It's a creditable list of talents.  And although Catholics have historically been in the majority in Western Europe – and an oppressive majority at that – in Britain post Reformation they were a minority and often persecuted.  So he would have all the pleasures of being anti-establishment, and none of the dangers of earlier ages, which should satisfy a revolutionary spirit like his.

When I came across his piece ridiculing Alain de Botton's ideas of a genteel atheism I was firmly on Eagleton's side. It is a repulsive idea, that the elite should promote religion because it's good for the masses. Honest Christians don't think like that. C S Lewis frequently expressed his disgust at the idea that an educated caste of priests would keep one set of beliefs for themselves and another for their flock.  Lewis himself went the whole supernatural hog.

I hate being on Eagleton's side, as he's a slippery slyboots, so like Jim I pounced on this paragraph:-

Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there’s something believers can get their teeth into …

As Jim, and de Botton himself pointed out, this really is a hint at the sympathies of the writer and where his beliefs are heading.  Imagine a sentence like this:-

The late Osama Bin Laden, who some people think is now enjoying 72 virgins. . .

The "some people" aren't the credulous or superstitious that are being ridiculed. Though Eagleton isn't straight enough to say, "I believe in an afterlife where souls are judged" - he has to do the jokey wiggle that shimmers through his writing and makes it both dishonest and irritating- you can guess he'd like there to be such a place for his adversaries to admit how very wrong their wrongness was.

(As an aside, Eagleton obliquely and George Galloway openly do show relish at the thought Hitchens may be burning in hell for eternity.  I don't like either of them, but if I wouldn't them to suffer that fate for– not more than a week, anyway. )

The other Eagleton-trope in that quoted paragraph is:- Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer.

Shame we're still not united by an enforced Christendom complete with burnings of heretics or a cult of the Great Leader Stalin.   Also, is this being divided and contentious a distinction of "liberal-capitalist societies"?   Ancient Rome, say, could be very divided and contentious, including a plethora of religions and peoples, but it kept itself together for quite a long time with an idea of Roman citizenship, which I suppose can be called "communitarian".   But "liberal-capitalist" would not describe it in the slightest.

However this is typical Eagleton rhetoric.  Do a diatribe against atheism or what have you and then garnish it with something vaguely Marxist sounding, so it appears as weighty analysis and not a run of the mill critique. You can see it here in after a incoherent and dodgy piece about multi-culturalism (we're all the same really and isn't that great! no we're not, and isn't that great!!) 

Multiculturalism is not a threat because it might breed suicide bombers. It is a threat because the kind of political state we have depends upon a tight cultural consensus in order to implant its materially divisive policies.

That is a dubious statement, but it sounds like political analysis so gives more gravity to what could be instead mere cultural observation.

I don't know why Eagleton won't come clean vis-a-vis  his own Catholicism.  Is it because among the British academics and intellectuals who are his peers atheism and liberalism are the norm and religion a little backward (he would be better off in the USA)? Is it because, for all the talk of revolutionary priests "and the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice", it's associated with social conservatism?  Does he fear seeming less like the impartial analyst and more the partisan on religious matters?   Perhaps he doesn't really know himself - but if religion is attacked he reacts to the "twitch upon the thread"  and arises, thrashing and gasping. 

Dark Days in Winter

After the death of Hitchens on 15 December some people flippantly remarked that he had spoiled yet another Christmas.  However, he did get a dig in at his least favourite time of the year.  In one of his, as usual, fine pieces of literary criticism,  he says of Dickens:-

Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.

CH - I am sorry you are dead, if only so you will not have someone point out to you that in your prose you overworked two adjectives - "moist" (here an adverb).  The other one is "fetid."    But also, my December and other people's Decembers are not darkened by "protracted obligatory celebration".  Dickens, it seems, loved walking through London on Christmas Day to see that in every house every person was involved in preparing for Christmas, and Christmas makes most sense as a collective celebration.  It is not like the kind of enforced show that you get in North Korea, but the taking part of something that is both publicly celebrated and to which each family will bring its own little bit of tradition - what time they open the presents or including a dish that a foreign family member once introduced.  

Now your December days were not dark - you earned money doing work you loved and were popular and successful.  For the rest of us dull drones though there is a lightening to the heart at the decorated trees, the Nativity scenes, the carollers in the supermarket and on the streets, the beautiful music being played, the sweet story itself - that of birth and hope for the humble.   You had a grand life, but those of us whose lives are more meagre find some passing delight in these things.   Christmas has been taken on by people of other faiths or none.

So though I shall miss you greatly I shan't miss your constant groans against Christmas.  To bring some brightness of tinsel and decoration in those dark short days - when some of us barely see the natural light -is an act of collective creativity.  Remember, a tradition is the democracy of the dead  as Chesterton, a great Christmas and Dickens lover, once said. 

Dreich Sunday

They have done up the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which Carl and I visited on Sunday afternoon, a good outing for a dreich December day. I'd say the refurbishment has been a great success.  The building is neo-Gothic red sandstone. It has enjoyable Victorian touches like the stairwell with murals of historical scenes e.g. St Margaret landing at Queensferry. These they have kept but they have moved the cafe, which was small, into one of the former galleries and the big arches let in a lot of light on the cafe goers. Good scones as well.

Foyer and frieze

Before the renovations the ground floor contained miles of Stuarts. God, how I got sick of seeing acres of satin dresses on the female Stuarts like Queen Anne.  I can just about take them up to James VI (James I of England) and Charles I and II but when after that every Stuart is still  regarded as Scots, descending through to the white-wigged Hanoverians, even though between Charles II and George IV none of the British monarchs visited Scotland. The Stuarts have now been shoved into a gallery at the top floor, and instead you have a bright space of Hot Scots with photographs of actors and comedians like Amando Ianucci and David Tennant.  Though I suppose that is dumbing down, I'd far rather look at a picture of Robert Carlyle than another Stuart any day.

(Re dumbing down, there are touch screens, interactivity and the rest of it, but not too many nor overly gimmicky and these do make it pleasanter to bring children, for whom there are various activities.)

Among the Hot Scots was Jack Vettriano, the highly popular painter whose paintings look as if he has copied them from 1930s pulp fiction covers.  Vettriano is always complaining how the art establishment won't take him seriously and put him in the classy exhibitions.  He's finally got a spot with a self-portrait called Weight which I thought rather good - at least it caught the tackiness of the furniture of the flimsy high varnish veneered type.  (I've been looking for furniture recently and have seen slabs of toffee-shiny chests of drawers and bedside tables in second-hand and charity shops.)

Weight by Jake Vettriano

Another striking picture was that of John Byrne by David Eustace. Carl, who is an artist, said something about the texture of the picture, which was ink-jet printed.  My own ink jet printer could not produce that kind of detail but he assured me such printers do exist. 

Ed Byrne by David Eustace

We then got a thrill riding in the big glass lift to the next floor where there were various exhibitions eg paintings of naval battles of the First World War.  A section was given to famous modern Scots with a small space for poets. including the group portrait called Pub Poets, a gathering of poets of the twentieth century Scots Renaissance,  MacDiarmid, Macaig and the rest.  But no picture of Edwin Muir.  I'd like to say he's the most considerable Scots poet of the twentieth century, however to do that I'd have to read MacDiarmid, Macaig and the rest of them for comparison, which I don't want to do at present. He was a very good poet and his portrait should be somewhere.  His wife Willa Muir, was represented. She translated Kafka and was an important literary figure in her day, but does anyone read her works now?

Among the modern distinguished scientists was this nightmarish portrait of oncologists by Ken Currie.

Another gallery is a scholar's library of glass fronted bookcases on two levels and in some of the cases are phrenology samples and life and death masks. Voltaire's life mask is there, and it looks as witty and clever as a mask can.  On the other end of the scale are murderers like Burke and Hare, mad people, imbeciles and idiots and also a mask labelled "a cunning woman", whose expression was perfectly ordinary and pleasant.  It whiffed of pseudo-science ultimately leading to race theory and eugenics.  

The photography section had an exhibition called Romantic Camera: Scottish Photography & the Modern World - some good individual photographs but I could not really get the hang of the theme.  This part was crowded. I think the average gallery goer prefers photographs to paintings. 

The next floor up contained the more familiar collection -  Allan Ramsay portraits, Hume, Scott, Burns as well as the Stuarts - rearranged.  I'll come back and see them properly one day but after a quick skim we were both ready for a drink.  We were full of enthusiasm for the  gallery's makeover, and people I overheard were exclaiming what a good job had been done.  I suppose we had seen a half dozen objects that will stick - the John Byrne portrait, the Currie oncologists and the creepy masks, for instance - but it was the whole experience in itself that we found a pleasure to the point of exhilaration. The National Portrait Gallery will be the favourite winter outing for the Edinburgh bourgeoisie as the Botanic Gardens is for spring, summer and autumn. They really do themselves very well. 

Decline and fall

I've always thought the saying “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” was self-eivdently stupid, both physically and emotionally. I can't imagine a crowd of amputees,  paraplegics and others crippled from nearly fatal accidents chanting it in a chorus.  As for the realms of feeling, the bad things that batter you can toughen you or weaken you or leave you pretty much as you were.  There are no rules there and no consistency.  Now Hitchens is finding out the hard way that this maxim come from bravado rather than experience, truthfully reported.

Hitchen is dwindling.  The cancer, and its treatment, are assaulting him violently.  Swallowing is torture, and he's losing the use of his fingers so he is in fear of being unable to write.  However he can still put the words together and bear witness to the state of himself. 

I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. . . . . To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.
. . .

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise?

He quotes John Betjeman's poem Five O'Clock Shadow, with its vision of the modern unsupernatural hell that most of us will go through one day:-

This is the time of day when we in the Men's ward
Think "one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight."
When he who struggles for breath can struggle less strongly:
This is the time of day which is worse than night.

A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds,
A doctors' foursome out of the links is played,
Safe in her sitting-room Sister is putting her feet up:
This is the time of day when we feel betrayed.

Below the windows, loads of loving relations
Rev in the car park, changing gear at the bend,
Making for home and a nice big tea and the telly:
"Well, we've done what we can. It can't be long till the end."

This is the time of day when the weight of bedclothes
Is harder to bear than a sharp incision of steel.
The endless anonymous croak of a cheap transistor
Intensifies the lonely terror I feel.

The digital and the real

Meeting

I would call it An Avatar at my Table.

This is one of Carl Barber's works.  He makes pictures by introducing cyber people into a photographic scene.  See more of them here.

He has an exhibition of his pictures at:-

BLUE BEAN
272 Portobello High St
Edinburgh EH15 2AT

Interest declared - he's a great friend of mine.

Hari on down

It's impossible not to write about Johann Hari's shenanigans.  I held down my fingers but they compulsively crawled to the keyboard. You hear that an award winning writer has smartened up his interviews by replacing what the interviewee said with something he wrote once, or said in a more articulate and aphoristic fashion to another interviewer.  You call this producing "an intellectual portrait".  As thousands of Twitterers have shown, it is obscenely easy to spoof and piss-take.

In the Reading Room of the British Museum Karl Marx shifts uneasily in his chair.  "Carbuncles,"  he explains to my inquiring and sympathetic gaze.  "What are my views on religion?"   He draws on his cigar, a spark falls in his beard which starts burning  and I pour water from a carafe over him.  He wipes his face and gazes on the heap of Blue Books that litter his desk.  "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

I imagine Johann Hari on the train from Hull looking glumly at his notes.  The great poet had been polite but not forthcoming.  What had he said about his childhood?  "I didn't enjoy it much."   This intellectual portrait was a mere paint by numbers sketch and he would have to fill in the rest.   So:-  

Larkin gazed out the window, and a faintly wounded expression came across his face:-  "They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they do not mean to but they do."

If Hari had fudged statistics – well, which of us can do the maths.  If he didn't pore over background material as thoroughly as he should have - that's forgivable for a 1000 word piece.  Hari however did something which anyone can see is dishonest.  Supporters find excuses for him. It seems he didn't get the regular journalist training and so missed the Ethics and Good Practice module.  But what he did falls within primary school play ground morality.   You don't say you heard someone say something to you when they didn't, even if it's the sort of thing they would say.

As a columnist Hari is used to scolding wrong-doers for their lapses of judgement and  ethics and now the scolded are avenged.  Those who have called him a light-weight in the past are full of I-told-you-so.   The right are drinking the best vintage Schadenfreude.    He's given everyone the chance to suggest that the Zeitgeist told him to blur the difference between "narrative" and "truth", and to deplore the tons of opinion to ounces of reportage that fill the newspapers these days.  In blog comments anonymous media navvies complain that Mr Glamour Boy gets the good gigs without the graft, and the big neon name is sent off to cover foreign affairs, transport and the environment, whether he knows anything about them or not. 

 I would never have broken my neck to read a Hari piece though when I have come across them recently I've thought he has got better and was not as callow and shallow as in his earlier writing years.  I was cheering him when on a discussion programme he gave the Roman Catholic church a smacking for their paedophilia cover up, pointing out that no other big organisation would have been allowed to get away with it.   He's liberal-left so no doubt I'm on his side most of the time.  

 But now he's shown he can't be trusted.  He'll never be quoted in this town again. 

Update:-

Hari hatches the egg

by Dr. Seuss

You meant what I said
And I said what you meant
And a journalist's faithful
One hundred per cent.

Good and bad hoaxes

I love a good hoax.  A hoax is a scam and a con job, but not the sort when a low-life flogs off expensive energy deals to pensioners.  Although some hoaxes have made money, that should not be what a hoax is designed for. Its object should be to make the pretentious and pompous look stupid, to expose the vanity of those in high places.   The Emperor's New Clothes is a satisfying story, but there would be little point to The Peasant's New Clothes. Hoaxees are gulled for believing what they want to believe, usually something flattering.   A hoax is cruel but its victims are not pathetic innocents.  You see them as being humiliated as they deserve.   Also, a good hoax confirms the prejudices of the on-lookers.  They have always known that the hoaxee had it coming to them for their superior airs and crackpot ideas. 

Some hoaxes:-

The Sokal Affair.  Alan Sokal submitted a paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", to the cultural studies journal Social Text.  The journal in all seriousness published this paper which among other things stated that "quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct".  The dupes were a bunch of post-modernist pseuds and academics.  They looked like posturing idiots and those who had suspected post-modernism was a shack of jargon were full of glee to see this eyesore get trashed.

The Hitler Diaries. This was more of a forgery for gain than pure mischief, but the egg faced and out of pocket were Rupert Murdoch, the editors of The Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek and the German magazine Stern, and the journalist who "discovered" the diaries, the Nazi-obsessive Gerd Heidemann.  The Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times said later: " When such a scoop is offered, you don't really want to hear anything that would cast doubt on its veracity."   Those of us who regard Rupert Murdoch as being a disgrace to truth and decency were justified by the greedy old despot saying about the affair "After all, we are in the entertainment business.” As a bonus, potential readers, the sort who are creepily fascinated about anything to do with Nazism, were cock-teased as well. 

The poems of Ern Malley. A hoax by a couple of Australian litterateurs on the editors of an avant-garde poetry magazine.  They concocted an unknown poet called Ern Malley and sent in his poems, which they had written deliberately badly.   The poetry magazine ran a special issue celebrating this new important voice in poetry.  The victims in this case were those who are overly impressed by literature that is obscure and difficult.

(Kingsley Amis wrote a story on a similar theme called Dear Illusion, about a poet who knowingly writes inept poetry that is lauded by the critics.)  

The Dreadnought Hoax.   Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury mates pretended to be Abyssinian royalty and were entertained by the Royal Navy on HMS Dreadnought.  I don't think it was that amusing, because I suppose the Navy officers had no choice but to be civil to foreign guests, but the fact that Virginia Woolf did this blacked up, bearded and in drag makes it stand out among hoaxes.  The Navy chaps gave the instigator, a poet and constant prankster called Horace de Vere Cole,  a token smack with a cane afterwards to satisfy their honour.

Virginia Woolf is at the far left

These days our armed forces have dwindled in size and power so a hoax on them would be silly childishness, whereas a successful hoax on, say, the Daily Mail or Simon Cowell, would delight a chunk of the British public.

The Conquest Letter.  I can't find a link for this but Kingsley Amis recounts it in his Memoirs. 

Robert Conquest, another poet and prankster and a distinguished Sovietologist, sent a letter to Philip Larkin marked HMG and stating that Larkin's collection of  pornography was to be investigated by officialdom.  Larkin dashed off to his solicitor's office and spent the whole day hiding there.  He later billed Conquest for the solicitor's time.   This event didn't spoil their friendship.   Conquest is a prolific writer and has been married four times.  He must have a lot of excess energy.

Philip Larkin wrote (bad) pornography himself, so there seems to be some justice in this hoax. 

My sister L. This was not a pure hoax, more of a wind up but L took a snapshot to school of a heart-throb pop-star, sitting right up close and smiling at her.  In fact, she had got a picture from a magazine, pinned it up on the garage wall and photographed that.  It did look very convincing for those who hadn't seen her other snaps, where she was inclined to cut off people's heads, or catch them as blurs in the corner.  This was funny and harmless.  If she had gone to school and said, for instance, that our mother had cancer, that would have been more in line with the Muchausen syndrome school of hoaxing, that is, unhealthily seeking attention.

Myself.  Once as art critic for a kind of Time Out magazine I did a piece of deliberate pretentious nonsense about an exhibition I'd seen - no-one spotted it but then I think no-one read it.   The magazine's editors thought they should cover exhibitions and as everyone else had snaffled the music side they gave that spot to me.  I should say I was, and am, fairly indifferent to painting and sculpture.  Those who like them should enjoy the Van Meergen hoax.  He faked a Vermeer which met an art critic's theory that Vermeer had been influenced by Italian painting.  Van Meegeren was happy with this result which confirmed what he had come to think about the Dutch art establishment and then found he could sell a phony Vermeer for a fortune so carried on faking.

The televisual hoaxer Ali G.  I can't stand the unfunny little arse and when he interviewed people who were very polite to him no matter how stupid and crass his questions, I was on their side.  I think the real dupes of his hoax were the idiots who found him entertaining.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - all right, drop the jokey tone.  The fact that this fraud is taken seriously still as a view of how the world works makes me howl.

So - a good hoax fulfils a victim's wishful thinking.  It's easy to see why Hamas loves the Protocols, why the Sokal hoaxees believed a real proper physicist endorsed their views about science and why the Australian avant-garde grabbed hold of their very own Dylan Thomas.  

The Gay Girl in Damascus is not a classic hoax since it was not created to show up the main dupes, the well-meaning progressives who sympathise with Syrian protesters.  The hoaxer Tom MacMaster is pleased with himself for adopting a persona that was so convincing it fooled his readers, but there's no sense that he's laughing at them for setting up and signing petitions demanding Amina's release from a Syrian jail.   MacMaster's  idea of wit is sarcastic jeering (common among activists).  One thing he does say is that his false blog exposed the "liberal Orientalism" of the west. 

Heresy Corner interprets :-

The clue to what he was playing at lies in the phrase "liberal Orientalism". It's not clear what liberal orientalism he thought he was exposing - perhaps it was the concern some (but not all) western liberals display for the plight of gay people and women in repressive Islamic societies. A perception which, of course, made "Amina" such a brave and representative heroine. It's even possible that he was deliberately creating a character who would prove irresistible to Western liberals, someone around whom they could unite - as indeed, for a time, they did.

MacMaster's own brand of liberal Orientalism, however, seems to have been of a different order - the celebration of an idealised Islamic society characterised above all by tolerance, pluralism and freedom. A picture entirely at odds with the burkhas and beheadings image perpetuated by that other sort of "orientalism" that sees Islam as irredeemably backward and savage. [The whole article is worth reading].

The "liberal orientalism" motive looks like an afterthought.  What the Gay Girl resembles is another literary counterfeit, the poems of Ossian.   A writer who cannot advance his works by their own merits passes them off as having been written by a more romantic figure.  MacMaster used the  beautiful lesbian rebel Amina, James MacPherson a druidlike bard called Ossian.  Both met the taste of their times. Amina's protest, authenticity and identity politics are much admired in modern culture. Macpherson's eighteenth century had developed a new interest in an ancient and native literature.  In Scotland this was "heightened by post-1745 nostalgic romanticisation of all things relating to the Highlands," (the progenitor of today's tourist industry).  Many contemporary Scots passionately wanted to believe in Scotland's antique literary heritage.   

Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes

The Gay Girl is a writer's hoax - of wanting to be taken seriously as a writer, because MacMaster does believe that his own work is of high quality that just needs a publishing break.  He also has strong sympathies with the Syrian uprising and so he coupled a writer's vanity with the unscrupulousness of a politico who feels justified in lying and forgery for a good cause.   

Samuel Johnson was famously sceptical about the Ossian poems which he called "an imposture" and what he said about  MacPherson goes for MacMaster, going by this interview:-

stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.